A man advanced in years, that thinks fit to look back upon his former life, and call that only life which was passed with satisfaction and enjoyment, excluding all parts which were not pleasant to him, will find himself very young, if not in his infancy.

A man that is temperate, generous, valiant, chaste, faithful, and honest, may, at the same time, have wit, humour, mirth, good breeding, and gallantry. While he exerts these latter qualities, twenty occasions might be invented to show he is master of the other noble virtues.

All that nature has prescribed must be good; and as death is natural to us, it is absurdity to fear it. Fear loses its purpose when we are sure it cannot preserve us, and we should draw resolution to meet it from the impossibility to escape it.

Allow no man to be so free with you as to praise you to your face. Your vanity by this means will want its food. At the same time your passion for esteem will be more fully gratified; men will praise you in their actions; where you now receive one compliment, you will then receive twenty civilities.

As beauty of body, with an agreeable carriage, pleases the eye, and that pleasure consists in that we observe all the parts with a certain elegance are proportioned to each other; so does decency of behavior which appears in our lives obtain the approbation of all with whom we converse, from the order, consistency, and moderation of our words and actions.

As for my labors, if they can but wear one impertinence out of human life, destroy a single vice, or give a mornings cheerfulness to an honest mindin short, if the world can be but one virtue the better, or in any degree less vicious, or receive from them the smallest addition to their innocent diversionsI shall not think my pains, or indeed my life, to have been spent in vain.

Beauty has been the delight and torment of the world ever since it began. The philosophers have felt its influence so sensibly that almost every one of them has left some saying or other which intimates that he knew too well the power of it.

Cheerfulness is always to be kept up if a man is out of pain; but mirth, to a prudent man, should always be accidental. It should naturally arise out of the occasion, and the occasion seldom be laid for it.

Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience, and stifled the voice of reason.

First we flatter ourselves; and then the flattery of others is sure of success. It awakens our self-love withina party who is ever ready to revolt from our better judgment, and join the enemy without.

He that can keep handsomely within rules, and support the carriage of a companion to his mistress, is much more likely to prevail than he who lets her see the whole relish of his life depends upon her. If possible, therefore, divert your mistress rather than sigh for her.

He that wants good sense is unhappy in having learning, for he has thereby only more ways of exposing himself; and he that has sense, knows that learning is not knowledge, but rather the art of using it.

I consider the soul of man as the ruin of a glorious pile of buildings; where, amidst great heaps of rubbish, you meet with noble fragments or sculpture, broken pillars and obelisks, and a magnificence in confusion.

I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable,that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painters imagination,what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil!

I remember to have heard a great painter say: There are certain faces for certain painters, as well as certain subjects for certain poets. This is as true in the choice of studies; and no one will ever relish an author thoroughly well who would not have been fit companion for that author, had they lived at the same time.

If I were to choose the people with whom I would spend my hours of conversation, they should be certainly such as labored no further than to make themselves readily and clearly apprehended, and would have patience and curiosity to understand me. To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them.

If we were to form an image of dignity in a man, we should give him wisdom and valor, as being essential to the character of manhood. In the like manner, if you describe a right woman, in a laudable sense, she should have gentle softness, tender fear, and all those parts of life which distinguish her from the other sex, with some subordination to it, but such an inferiority as makes her still more lovely.

If wit is to be measured by the circumstances of time and place, there is no man has generally so little of that talent as he who is a wit by profession. What he says, instead of arising from the occasion, has an occasion invented for bringing it in.

It is a certain sign of an ill heart to be inclined to defamation. They who are harmless and innocent can have no gratification that way; but it ever arises from a neglect of what is laudable in a mans self.

It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a mans conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn.

It is not only paying wages, and giving commands, that constitutes a master of a family, but prudence, equal behavior, with a readiness to protect and cherish them, is what entitles a man to that character in their very hearts and sentiments.

It is wonderful indeed to consider how many objects the eye is fitted to take in at once, and successively in an instant, and at the same time to make a judgment of their position, figure, and color. It watches against our dangers, guides our steps, and lets in all the visible objects, whose beauty and variety instruct and delight.

Knowledge of books is like that sort of lantern which hides him who carries it, and serves only to pass through secret and gloomy paths of his own; but in the possession of a man of business it is as a torch in the hand of one who is willing and able to show those who are bewildered the way which leads to their prosperity and welfare.

Nothing is more silly than the pleasure some people take in speaking their minds. A man of this make will say a rude thing for the mere pleasure of saying it, when an opposite behavior, full as innocent, might have preserved his friend, or made his fortune.

Of all mortals a critic is the silliest; for, inuring himself to examine all things whether they are of consequence or not, never looks upon anything but with a design of passing sentence upon it; by which means he is never a companion, but always a censor.

One of the old philosophers calls beauty a silent fraud, because it imposes upon us without the help of language. But I think Carneades spoke as much like a philosopher as any of them, though more like a lover, when he called it royalty without force.

Pleasure, when it is a mans chief purpose, disappoints itself; and the constant application to it palls the faculty of enjoying it, though it leaves the sense of our inability for that we wish, with a disrelish of everything else.

The Christian world has a Leader, the contemplation of whose life and sufferings must administer comfort in affliction, while the sense of His power and omnipotence must give them humiliation in prosperity.

The envious man is in pain upon all occasions which ought to give him pleasure. The relish of his life is inverted; and the objects which administer the highest satisfaction to those who are exempt from this passion give the quickest pangs to persons who are subject to it. All the perfections of their fellow creatures are odious. Youth, beauty, valor and wisdom are provocations of their displeasure. What a wretched and apostate state is this! to be offended with excellence, and to hate a man because we approve him!

The good husband keeps his wife in the wholesome ignorance of unnecessary secrets. They will not be starved with the ignorance, who perchance may surfeit with the knowledge of weighty counsels, too heavy for the weaker sex to bear. He knows little who will tell his wife all he knows.

The great foundation of civil virtue is self-denial; and there is no one above the necessities of life but has opportunities of exercising that noble quality, and doing as much as his circumstances will bear for the ease and convenience of other men.

The greatest evils in human society are such as no law can come at; as in the case of ingratitude, where the manner of obligation very often leaves the benefactor without means of demanding justice, though that very circumstance should be the more binding to the person who has received the benefit.

The happy talent of pleasing either those above or below you seems to be wholly owing to the opinion they have of your sincerity * * * There need be no more said in honor of it than that it is what forces the approbation of your opponents.

The men of the greatest character in this kind were Horace and Juvenal. There is not, that I remember, one ill-natured expression in all their writings, not one sentence of severity, which does not apparently proceed from the contrary disposition.

The most unhappy circumstance of all is, when each party is always laying up fuel for dissension, and gathering together a magazine of provocations to exasperate each other with when they are out of humor.

The world will never be in any manner of order or tranquillity until men are firmly convinced that conscience, honor and credit are all in one interest; and that without the concurrence of the former the latter are but impositions upon ourselves and others.

There is no one passion which all mankind so naturally give in to as pride, nor any other passion which appears in such different disguises. It is to be found in all habits and all complexions. Is it not a question whether it does more harm or good in the world, and if there be not such a thing as what we may call a virtuous and laudable pride?

There is nothing more necessary to establish reputation than to suspend the enjoyment of it. He that cannot bear the sense of merit with silence must of necessity destroy it; for fame being the genial mistress of mankind, whoever gives it to himself insults all to whom he relates any circumstance to his own advantage.

There is nothing that wears out a fine lace like the vigils of the card table, and those cutting passions which naturally attend them. Hollow eyes, haggard looks and pale complexions are the natural indications.

This great author (Horace), who had the nicest taste of conversation, and was himself a most agreeable companion, had so strong an antipathy to a great talker, that he was afraid, some time or other, it would be mortal to him.

To men addicted to delights, business is an interruption; to such as are cold to delights, business is an entertainment. For which reason it was said to one who commended a dull man for his application: No thanks to him; if he had no business, he would have nothing to do.

We see a world of pains taken and the best years of life spent in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life, and after all the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want common sense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valour, justice and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed with these excellencies, if he wants that inferior art of life and behaviour called good-breeding.

Were men so enlightened and studious of their own good as to act by the dictates of their reason and reflection, and not the opinion of others, conscience would be the steady ruler of human life, and the words truth, law, reason, equity, and religion could be but synonymous terms for that only guide which makes us pass our days in our own favor and approbation.